Chapter 3. Tilling the Soil to Find Ourselves: Conversion, Labor, and [Re]membering in Gaines's Of Love and Dust and In My Father's House (original) (raw)

Errant Memory in African American Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century

2015

In this dissertation, I trace the complex black literary trope of errant memory through American and African American literature. Authors of African descent are constantly subjected to what I call Africanity, or the paratextual historicizing elements provided by white interlocutors that seek to impose specific caricatures and stereotypes on them and their works to force them into the American historical narrative that depends on their dehumanized and commodified status. These caricatures and stereotypes are rooted in an Africa imagined by these white interlocutors, one that does not match any reality. Authors of African descent transcend this paratextual Africanity through what I call errant memory. Based on Edouard Glissant's errantry, which stipulates a way of life that is simultaneously aware of and disproves the sovereignty of Universalisms, errant memory emphasizes the act of remembering over fetishized narratives of trauma and inescapable violence inherent in Universal History and its version of black life and history. In short, persons of African descent are not just socially dead, they are mnemonically dead as well. Their mnemonic life is replaced with static and dehumanizing historical narratives. However, African American literature serves as a testament to mnemonic life. Africanity seeks to disallow authors of African descent to participate in the true freedom found within the space of literature, defining and determining their literary capacities to mimicking, parroting, rebelling, resisting, or otherwise reacting to and against the way white hegemonic society reads them. Errant memory, occupying the space of literature, explodes these definitions through the choice to embrace and emphasize personal, indeterminate, and disorienting memories. Instead of allowing the rhetoric of trauma to dictate their mnemonic lives, authors of African descent, including Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Turner, Hannah Crafts, and W.E.B. Du Bois, read their determined roles within the larger historical narrative and reclaim their personal mnemonic relationships with the important moments of the Middle Passage and American Slavery, freeing their literature and these cultural memories to the possibility of unlimited interpretation. v Table of Contents

Errant Memory in African American Literature of the Long 19 th

2015

The Preservation of Cultural Memory in African-American Fiction

International Journal of English and Literature, 2021

The aim of this paper will be to attempt an examination of how folktales have been a part of the cultural memory of African-Americans and how it has been explored through literature, especially a reworking of these tales into short stories and other forms of fiction. It will further be attempted to explore the sense of identity in the African-American community as can be found in these stories and how much of that still persists in their consciousness and imagination to this day.

The Negro Speaks: Reading into the Archive Otherwise

I look to deploy the readers' lens as a tool through which we might exact material from the spaces where the Africanist presence ruptures, shapes, and contributes to the narrative. We know, as Hughes makes clear, that the Negroes knows rivers. I want to make an attempt at locating, as reader, then, the spaces in literature where the Negro speaks of them as well, in doing so, we will “[chart] new worlds out of black, wet infinity.”

Pitch Black, Black Pitch: Theorizing African American Literature

Abstract: This essay proffers that African American literature, especially that of the contemporary moment, seeks a non-canonical canon, that is, unlawful laws, unruly rules, reading lists that morph and shake serial listedness. Furthermore, African American literature as theorized here is concerned with three constitutive nodes: first, a certain kind of memory, one that is not simply revisionist or a Morrisonian “rememory” but what I call “memoricity,” that which carries the historicity of moments, the very subjectivity of things not past but deeply contemporary. It denotes the historicity of the contemporary, and simultaneously the contemporaneity of history. Second, the underground, snugly fitting within familiar notions of the underground in African American literature, but here proffered as more than a site of secrecy or dormancy; it is, rather, a liminal, mezzanine space of generative disruption and, too, vibrant, volatile epistemic radicality. Thirdly, seeing: not to be reduced to ocular perception, it is a seeing that encapsulates a more capaciously embodied practice that engages more than simply the eyes, a seeing that is a matter of full corporeality. These three nodes are, in African American literature, characterized under the helm of a Black synesthetic practice—seeing-without-light, knowledges “muzzled to those shores,” a lexicon in the dark, unintelligible to the logic of the light, underground epistemologies. To be examined are six texts: Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (2016), Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines (2016), Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall (2012), Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval (2009), and Joshua Bennett’s The Sobbing School (2016). Copyright: This work originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review 18.1, winter 2018, published by Michigan State University Press.

Haunt or Home? Ethos and African American Literature

Humanities

The African American rhetorical tradition could be described as a shelter in an alien environment or as a way station on a long journey. A focus on ethos suggests that such a narrow approach to African American literature cannot do justice to these literary texts: how these writers employ images and symbols, craft and deploy examine identities, blend, criticize, and create traditions, explore contemporary issues, and create community. Because of cultural and racist narratives, African Americans could not simply use either the pre-Socratic or Aristotelian approaches to ethos in their fight for social justice. This essay demonstrates how a postclassical approach to ethos that draws on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and is focused on community-building and self-healing is central to the African American literature and rhetoric.

Words Left Unspoken in the Lives of the Black

Words Left Unspoken in the Lives of the Black Vicky Chaparyan Lebanese University Abstract Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved, represents a postmodern traumatic story the characters of which deal with black history and the scars it has left on the African American community. As Rafael Perez-Torres claims, “the story of slavery invoked by Beloved is built on the absence of power, the absence of self-determination, the absence of homeland, the absence of a language” (Perez-Torres 1993:131). Throughout the story T. Morrison gives a voice to a ghost to speak up, but she takes away the voice of the ghost’s mother who does not have the power to tell her story about her infanticide and so, has a troubled relationship with language. Later, Beloved’s sister, Denver, who becomes dumb and deaf after learning the story about her mother’s infanticide, gets back her senses when she goes to the community to ask for help to nurture her suffering mother. Although T. Morrison treats different themes, the following paper is an attempt to study the importance of language in Beloved, through comparing the Maternity symbolic order in Morrison to the Paternity symbolic order in Jacque Lacan’s The Psychoses (1955-1956). Key words: Beloved, slavery, Maternity symbolic order, Paternity symbolic order, J. Lacan, unspeakable thoughts, language, ghost, story of trauma.

Choreographies of the Ongoing: Episodes of Black Life, Events of Black Lives

Biography, 2018

In this essay, I weave personal narratives together with "public" events to theorize the complex feelings of regularly encountering spaces of black death and trauma. To do so, I use the concept of "episodic events" to collapse distinctions between memorable events and the quiet passage of nondescript episodes in order to push us to think about the grief that stains and strains the lifeworlds of people most invested in Black Lives Matter. In doing so, the essay meditates on the stakes of Black life, constituted by an intimacy with the environment that makes the scenes of events, no matter the scale, part of one's daily episodes. Attention to Black life in the political era of Black lives means that we consider the forms of intimacy beyond racial kinship that do not allow for the symbolic signification that happens when we are moved by the atrocity happening to the person central to the racial event. Thus by contending with the "afterlives" of black murder, this essay attempts to deal with the visceral of the episodic, the ongoingness, the living-through that is often sidelined, if considered at all, in the tight focus of the juridical promise of the event.

Chapter 3. Tilling the Soil to Find Ourselves: Conversion, Labor, and [Re]membering in Gaines's Of Love and Dust and In My Father's House (original) (raw)

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